1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to telecommunications systems, and more particularly to telephone systems providing services for customers to access telephone conversations based upon a desired conversation topic.
2. Description of the Related Art
Telephone systems are currently used to provide a service for permitting a caller to access an on-going telephone conversation by dialing a specific telephone number, such as a 900 toll service. Typically, the specific telephone number relates to a single conversation topic. Accordingly, in these prior art telephone systems, the caller manually dials a specific telephone number corresponding to the conversation topic of interest and, so long as a conversation was on-going, the caller would be connected to and could participate in that particular conversation.
These prior art telephone systems, however, have a number of limitations. For instance, in the prior art systems, the number of available conversation topics are limited due to the fact that each telephone number is typically dedicated to a single or a limited number of conversation topics. The number of available topics are limited because the prior art systems required the topics to be verbally enumerated to the caller and this verbal enumeration is too slow to be practicable for more than typically ten topics.
Thus, in order to introduce additional conversation topics, a provider of these services must absorb the expense of contracting for additional 900 telephone services, which may also include expenses for market research to select the most popular topics and advertising to promote the new topics. Consequently, the prior art systems provide only a limited number of the most popular conversation topics. Less popular topics or topics that are popular for only a short period of time would not typically be offered due to the aforementioned expenses in introducing new topics.
Moreover, once the caller identifies and manually dials the telephone number for the desired conversation topic, the caller is only connected to the call if a conversation is on-going. However, in the not uncommon situation where there is no pending conversation, the call is terminated and the caller must repeatedly dial the number until a conversation is then pending.